#56 A woman who denies that men have any kind of feelings at all, as a justification for having a defective store-bought personality and for being an all-round cunt
#57 An old Asian couple who think that walking slowly on a busy street is Zen
#58 Anyone who objects when I bludgeon them out of the way on a footpath
#59 Any white person who thinks that all rap is bad because they've heard six bad radio edits from some celluoid whore and they were, predictably, dreadful
#60 Anyone who doesn't forgive me for doing things that I was going to do anyway

Kris was about to finish college, and had one last assignment to do. However, he hated his professor (a no-account religious philosopher with a shitty academic record, I later discovered). So what did he do with his assignment?

Answer: Give it the Billingsgate treatment.

According to him, the professor read it, declined to mark it and threw it out. A huge compliment to my writing.

***

"There is a god who loves humankind"

Can anyone have knowledge of statements like the one you have chosen? Justify your answer. If so, how? If not, why not?

(In order to answer the assigned questions you will need to outline your theory of knowledge, at least implicitly.)

(Make sure what you deal with the possibility of knowledge with regard to the set of claims that you have chosen. you do not have to prove that you actually know the claim to be true or false.)

Put arguments into your own words, use quotes sparingly.

600-800 words

***

Masturbating about the nature of knowledge holds no interest here. Psychology is such a scarred, flawed, incorrect process that there seems little point in even saying "I know this to be true". The nature of knowledge becomes as ruptured as the hymen of a 12-year-old Hindu bride when we start to consider all the heuristics, biases, and reasoning errors that the human mind commits willingly and fulsomely every single day it has the unfortunate pleasure of drawing breath.

Knowledge in itself is thus a standard to be aspired to rather than achieved. Objectivity is a shining glass tower which is itself behind bullet-proof glass. The science that we have made for ourselves lets us develop crude paper approximations of that tower, forms which support the super-structure of knowledge around and above it, but not much more. Nevertheless, our progress marches on and even in paper it is a beautiful structure to behold.

Faith has no place in the modern world. Everything that we know is derived, an continuous, endless series of little inductive waltzes. Faith is a product of the ignorant mind which blindly steps off into the unknown, justifying itself every step of the way. Ignoring reason, ignoring intuition, it over-rides, co-opts and corrupts, it ass-pounds, pillages and rips its way through the social fabric of the unworthy.

The criminal history of any Church and its religious leaders is always a good example of how the idea of a loving God is a pleasant idea which is inevitably destroyed by anyone who might have the unmitigated brain-haemorrhaging stupidity to believe in it. Religion, the ultimate moral absolute, tears through cultures and ideas alike. It has the criteria which science is terrified of - unfalsifiability. Why is science terrified of this? Because it means that a theory can never, ever be wrong. Psychoanalysis suffers from this particular affliction. It makes predictions so vague, its links between the mind and behaviour are so tenuous and vague that it can always come up with an explanation for an action which makes sense. When it does so, scientist psychologists are tempted to call it a ?religion?. Why? Because it has become an article of faith, and no constructive use to any bugger.

The idea of God as love is a particularly disgusting 20th century affliction. The idea of all-pervasive happy times could only have evolved after the mass consumer revolution. Tell an Aztec slave, Egyptian servant or a Samurai warrior that the only God (and none of them believe in only one) means love, happiness, hugs and the occasional blowjob from sanctified lips, and they'd laugh in your face and bean you with the nearest lump of basalt. Our senescence, our comfort, our "cakes and ale", have become our justifying force. People seek 'happiness' - isn't that the latest self-help mantra? Are you "happy"? Leave your job/wife/husband/testicles/gender if you aren't. Make yourself happy...

...Make yourself nothing. Suffering is every much a part of life as any of these feelings are. Beanie Babies and the double-stim vibrator have made us forget that we are in fact animals and the will to survive justifies itself. Less animate beings than humans exist entirely separate to theology, and exist for their own sake. Naturally, that stupid mouldy growth on the top of your head that you call a neocortex will not let you do otherwise.

Any discussion about the nature of God and truth is unending, and irreconcilable. Believers begin with, prima facie, God exists. Heretics begin with, prima facie, God must prove himself. Any appeal to the idea of God precludes argument. God encompasses every idea, every possibility, every tangible thread of existence, are all encompassed by our deity. Why should we argue about this? This means that God is either everything or nothing.

When we reach this point, the argument diverges, making it impossible to continue. This is what makes nihilism so convenient, because everything is nothing. God therefore becomes a series of social rituals, each similarly antiquated and pointless.

To this end, let me conclude:

God is not a benevolent Father Christmas without a visible face who lives in the heavens. God is nothing more than a miserable, evil, cowardly method of argument, a confluence of three letters which has caused more confusion, degradation and suffering than any of the others in any format.

God voids his all-mighty bowels directly into the mouth of the very idea of humanity. Yes, God is metaphysical scat porn. So, I hope when you wake up tomorrow morning you can't taste the sweet nutty tang of the fresh turds he dropped in your mouth while you were dreaming of ass-fucking your secretary.

I have been looking forward to a particular South Park episode for weeks, and what happens when it's due to be screened? It gets pulled. Angry letter ensued:

""
On 10/01/05, a matter of some confusion arose ? your internal SBS South Park website lists Episode 812 ?Stupid Spoiled Whore Video Playset? for transmission on 10/01/05 (http://www.sbs.com.au/southpark/). However, in the general program guide linked from the SBS website frontpage (http://www.sbs.com.au/whatson/index.php3?progdate=10:01:2005) it lists Episode 813 ?Cartman?s Incredible Gift? for transmission. Bizarre.

After a 10 minute phone call (your hold music is wretched), a less-than-pleasant desk simian revealed that it would be, in fact, Episode 812 that would be screening that evening, and thanked me for my call in a voice that subliminally screamed ?Go intercourse yourself?.

?Oh, and at 8.30pm you screened Episode 813.

Needless to say, I was disappointed and I suspect you have ?declined to purchase? this episode in the manner of every single other South Park, from all 8 series. Censorship by any other name.

South Park is truly vicious social satire, delivered with a venom of which Jonathon Swift would have been proud. Yes, he may have been offended at the image of Paris Hilton continually hacking up semen, but at the very least he would have understood the target and the comment as fair game. The program, its creators and your viewers do not deserve this kind of shabby treatment.

While I do not wonder how the images of pet suicide, rampant fourth grade sluts and competitive insertion contests might be construed as offensive, it is a pity this is another issue the public will never decide for themselves. A later time slot, an MA rating, and you might have made so very many people happy.

Yours sincerely,
Billingsgate
""

That's about as polite as I'm capable of. There is one flipside however - I might actually merit a response. Typically I imagine my rantypants letters aren't really considered legitimate complaints. There's something about the word "cunt" that guarantees no-one will ever be replying. I'll keep you posted in case the slimy fuckweasels write back.

#46 Anyone who reads the Bible in public
#47 A pre-pubescent Indian boy who can't grow a moustache but tries anyway
#48 Anyone who reads aloud to anyone, ever
#49 A belligerent old woman who expects special favours because she is a belligerent old woman
#50 Anyone who uses the phrase "brother-man"

#51 Anyone who takes Michael Moore's books very seriously, and wishes to argue about them
#52 An barely-voting age person with a strong political affiliation
#53 An arse-ugly girl heavily involved in student politics
#54 A clerk who wants to chat at great length about the weather, or the performance of football teams
#55 Anyone who has a facial birthmark and is ashamed of it

I started writing this list a few months ago, and every time I come back to it, it blows out by another 20 items or so. There seems to be no end to the parade of irritating, shallow, slack-jawed cretins that parade themselves through my days like Thai whores for sale. I think they're all very self-explanatory. Some people who have read the below list disagree. They say there is little reason and absolutely no sense to the way I think. If this is you, I cordially invite you to break your own spine with a toffee hammer and keep your feckless opinions to yourself in future.

Below is the original list, around 40. I hope one day to make 1000. Additions will be posted later.

#1 A man who conducts loud foreign language conversations on a bus
#2 Anyone with big lips who speaks French.
#3 An obese Asian child who collects tokens from chip packets and plays games with them
#4 A schoolchild with a visible deformity
#5 Any techno-dick who carries more than 2 small noisy electronic devices.
#6 A porn actress with unerect nipples
#7 A journalist who only 'drinks sensibly'
#8 Anyone over the age of 16 who still works in a fast-food dive
#9 A drunk homeless woman who interrupts your date
#10 A tradesman who has more dandruff than concrete dust on his shirt

#11 Anyony studying to become a homeopath, seer, crystal gazer or chakra balancer
#12 A woman with much too much advice.
#13 A middle-aged fat man in a new pastel designer shirt
#14 An Asian clerk who won't talk
#15 Any old person who mentions 'The War', regardless of which
#16 Anyone who begins every sentence with "Well, ya know..."
#17 A teenager who says "like" more than fourteen times in a single sentence
#18 A radio announcer with bad grammar
#19 Anyone who calls a talk-back radio show
#20 Any black man who desparately wants to be white

#21 Any white man who desparately wants to be black
#22 Anyone in a wheelchair with bumber stickers
#23 A builder with a packet of smokes rolled into his shirt-sleeve
#24 Anyone who has been described on late-night television as a 'fitness expert'
#25 A man who tries to read off my pad when I'm writing in public. You can see this, can't you. Stop staring, you obdurate cunt!
#26 Any white man with a perm
#27 A newsreader who can't pronounce simple foreign names
#28 A newsreader who can't pronounce complicated foreign names.
#29 Any fat woman on a train who 'knows Jesus'
#30 An old man who drives a good car badly

#31 An urban mother who drives a vehicle heavier than two metric tons
#32 A child with a 'learning disorder'
#33 Anyone who worships a random minor literary figure to be 'different'
#34 Anyone who thinks dolphins are 'special'
#35 Any young girl in more than two cubic inches of make-up
#36 An ugly gay man in a "Princess" t-shirt
#37 A lesbian with an ammunition box handbag
#38 A cripple who stands in the geometric centre of an elevator
#39 A very fat man in a very small car
#40 A receptionist who doesn't like anyone, ever

#41 Anyone who has ever described a set of colours as "warm tones"
#42 A dentist with enormous hands
#43 Any teenage goth who writes poetry
#44 Anyone who knows a teenage goth who writes poetry and hasn't disfigured them yet
#45 An ugly woman who lies in an internet personals ad